Homeowner rights in Nebraska

Nebraska runs two separate condominium statutes side by side, and which one covers you depends entirely on when your condominium was created. If your condo was created before January 1, 1984, you're under the legacy Condominium Property Act (Neb. Rev. Stat. §§ 76-801 to 76-824.01), a narrower statute the Legislature has been quietly phasing down for four decades but that still fully governs the condos still living under it. If your condo was created on or after that date, you're under the Nebraska Condominium Act (Neb. Rev. Stat. §§ 76-825 to 76-894), the newer statute that spells out declarations, unit owners associations, executive boards, meetings, assessments, liens, and enforcement remedies in real detail. Confirm your condominium's creation date before relying on any specific section number on this page; a real, shrinking population of Nebraska condos is still governed by the older, thinner Act.

If you don't own a condo at all, if you're in an ordinary subdivision HOA or planned community, neither of these Acts touches you. Nebraska has no Property Owners' Association Act and no Planned Community Act, nothing filling that gap the way roughly forty other states have done. Your HOA's power to fine you, lien your home, or restrict your fence comes entirely from what your recorded declaration and bylaws say, backstopped only by general Nebraska nonprofit-corporation law if your association incorporated that way. That's a real difference from states that hand every association-governed owner the same statutory floor, and it means the single most important document for a Nebraska HOA owner is your own declaration, not this page.

What Nebraska's Condominium Act actually gives owners

For condo owners under the modern Act, the floor is real. Section 76-860(a)(11) lets the association levy fines for rule violations, but only "after notice and opportunity to be heard," and the fine itself has to be "reasonable." Section 76-874 gives the association a lien for unpaid assessments, but wraps it in a recording requirement, a three-year window to enforce it, and a rule that lets any owner force a written accounting of what's owed within ten business days. Section 76-876 makes the association's financial and other records available for examination by any unit owner. None of that is a favor from your board; it's the statutory minimum the Legislature wrote into Chapter 76.

The catch is how much of that floor depends on your Act, your declaration, and your creation date. There's no statewide dollar cap on fines the way some states write directly into their statute, no codified "statement of owner rights" handed to you at closing, and, outside the two condo Acts, no statute at all for the ordinary subdivision HOA. What Nebraska gives you is a real procedural floor for condo owners, layered with real gaps everywhere else. This page is honest about both, topic by topic.